Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Thursday March 03, 2011 @10:13AM
from the i-miss-you-omm dept.

shoptroll writes "In what can be best described as an unfortunate interpretation of the 'notability standards' at Wikipedia, Rock, Paper, Shotgun reports that the entry for Old Man Murray, once a mainstay of PC Gaming reviews and commentary, has been deleted. A sad day for gaming journalism everywhere." This is notable both because Old Man Murray was completely and totally awesome, but also because it was notable and influential on countless writers.

I have to be honest; at first when I read this reply, I was pretty convinced you were just another Wikipedia deletion whiner, bitching about how your all-time favoritest web site EVAR was deleted by some obviously incompetent and unfit-for-duty Wikipedia editor. I was just about ready to dismiss this entire thing as "bitch, bitch, bitch, nerd rage is hilarious".

Then I actually read over the AfD for Old Man Murray, and it turns out you're absolutely right. This Schumin character IS a little bitch, isn't he*? I'm seeing citation after citation in that discussion, each following Wikipedia's standards for notability (in terms of video games and video game sites), and he's confidently and smugly ignoring each one just to push his agenda. Wow. There's reasons I stopped trying to edit Wikipedia a while back.

*: Yes, you may cite this post as need be in future discussions, Wikipedia or not, as to the degree to which Ben Schumin is a little bitch.

Well this was informative. Before reading this article and the comments, I had no idea who Ben Schumin was, or that he was a fat whiny anti-war inclusionist exclusionist precisionist lolcow who deleted wikipedia pages (against the will of the majority and in the face of evidence of notability which he requested, and then ignored when it was brought to him) referencing websites made by a person who once made fun of him.

From what I can see [wikipedia.org], it didn't have sources. The references were to the Old Man Murray site itself, a primary source, and blogs, which are not reliable sources. Wikipedia articles should have references to reliable secondary sources. This is the notability [wikipedia.org] guideline. Wikipedia is meant to condense information written in reliable secondary sources, that is, edited books, periodicals and websites, about the topic of the article. If there were no secondary sources from which to condense information into a Wiki

The review itself cited some good sources. Edge magazine, which is pushing 20 years old itself, has extolled the site's historical relevance. The bother is that the admin in question judged those arguments as unacceptable. It should do better at deletion review, assuming it's been passed there.

Deletion is supposed to be the last resort [wikipedia.org] No notices were put up to improve the article, no messages sent to a relevant wikiproject for volunteers to help out. Just Ben Schumin (a man a writer of OMM made fun off a decade ago) tying to pull a fast one. Schumin also removed references to Erik Wolpaw from several pages recently.

So pop in #wikipedia and cite the slashdot, page, then note on the restored OMM article that it has been targeted by Ben Schumin due to funny comments at Schumin's expense, and that this caused an internet incident of mass public scale.

So, two uncontradicted facts: (a) Schumin has a personal history with the people behind the site whose page he deleted and (b) from his user page and web site, he doesn't appear to have any gaming knowledge whatsoever. Yet the rest of the Wikipedia clique ignore these facts when rushing in to defend his action. I first contributed to Wikipedia back in 2004, and I note my last contribution was over 9 months ago as I got increasingly exhausted with having to defending and revert the most inoccuous edits to topics I'm knowledgable on, from self-appointed admins who knew absolutely nothing about the topic at hand but simply had their own bugbears (in one case, an admitted interest in pederasty). Even Wales says 50% of all the edits are done by just 0.7% of the users; anyone claiming that such few people know so much stuff is deluded. The fact is, after a decade, it takes a particular type of personality to fit in with the Wikipedia mindset and not be actively repulsed by it.

Sources found included PC Gamer, Gabe Newell, RPS, Kotaku, Wired, MaximumPC, Edge Magazine, Quake 3, Postal 2, Serious Sam, the UGO network WHICH OMM WAS A MEMBER OF and a host of others. All were ignored. RPS reacted immediately to the news because it's insane, and their article being directly about OMM should assuage even unreasonable demands. Wikipedia absolutely loathes outsiders [wikipedia.org], though, so who knows if it will be restored?

What will Wikipedia "cite" when books/magazines stop being published, and only exist in the ephemeral world of the web? I guess all articles will have to be deleted from wikipedia..... or better yet, make a sane world that doesn't require sources to be published on dead trees/weeds/hemp.

Also looking over the discussion it appears KEEP was the dominant vote tally, but somehow the page still got deleted. This is a bit like how Florida tallied votes

Unfortunately, this is exactly the argument that I've seen in the past for deleting 'non-notable' articles. Someone marks the article for deletion. This deletion notice is then linked to from somewhere that the people who are interested in the topic at hand frequently read. People in that community log in, post citations, and vote for keep. All of those keep votes are disregarded and the citations are ignored, because they were all from people who created their accounts specifically to comment ('meatpuppets'). End result: Wikipedia becomes one page less useful. The Wikipedia procedure seems to be set up so that it's very hard once an article has been nominated for deletion to get it to remain. I gave up contributing to Wikipedia a couple of years ago - what's the point in investing your time in creating something when someone else may come along and delete it on a whim?

From what I can see, it didn't have sources. The references were to the Old Man Murray site itself, a primary source, and blogs, which are not reliable sources. Wikipedia articles should have references to reliable secondary sources. This is the notability guideline.

If real historians and assorted worked as these amateurs then we would be missing an awful lot of history. For instance Atlantis... only mentioned ONCE in history and it didn't cite sources, so BYE BYE Atlantis. A REAL historian simply notes the mention of Atlantis and that there is only one source with no references for it AND THAT IS IT.

That is where Wikipedia fails utterly. Mentioning that something is NOT sourced IS ENOUGH. A full record INCLUDES personal remarks and unverified claim and that is perfectly valid AS LONG as you note this. Yes, some pruning can be needed in extreme cases but the anal retentive "citation needed" is making a joke out the site. A normal encyclopedia would have no trouble saying the Hindenburg was a disaster. Wikipedia requires a citation. So? Well, they NEVER then check that the citation is ACCURATE.

So by Wikipedia and article claiming Nazi propoganda is correct would pass since there are PLENTY of sources to cite from. Just because you can cite from something does NOT make it fact.

Wikipedia is an intresting experiment but ultimately shows why volunteer work and crowdsourcing just don't work for anything important. The type of person to volunteer all to often tends to filter down eventually to the completly incompetent power hungry assholes.

Why do you think Gentoo is failing and Ubuntu is rising? Complete freedom is a bad way to get something done. And the Wikipedia editors are far to free.

Uhhh..WTF? Several games plug OMM directly in the game, such as the monitors in Postal2 or the developers hidden in Serious Sam which follow Sam when freed and call out "Old Man Murry!" Hell it is common knowledge that the reason you see a crate so early both in the original Half Life and Half Life 2 is because the developers tried to beat OMM's "Start To Crate" (which I still do to this day when playing FPS) and finally said "fuck it" and threw in a crate at the front to basically hang a lampshade on it.

OMM seriously affected games of the late 90s/early 00s because OMM was THE review site because if you could get OMM on your side there was serious buzz to be had. I know I bought Serious Sam as soon as I could could and would have never heard of the game otherwise if it weren't for OMM. So yeah, I gotta call it as I see it, another case of delentionism which the Wiki has waaaay too much of as of late.

nonsense. wikipedia, has for example, summaries for each and every episode of popular anime *as a separate article*, yet uses "notable" argument against content of actual cultural significance. That is hypocrisy and a double standard.

If Wikipedia had to be consistent, then nothing would ever get done. There are millions of articles, so you'd need to make a million edits all at once if every editorial policy (e.g. establishing notability) had to be applied to all articles consistently. So, when someone with an interest in gaming reviews makes a call on whether Old Man Murray has sufficient notability, there is no expectation that he should therefore have to go looking for animé articles to delete.

You'd have more of a point if "Wikipedia" was a person. It's not. The clique that handles anime articles has different standards than the clique that handles this, that, and the other. You can impose consistency but at the cost of causing people to complain about this or that article being left in or deleted.

One of the nice things about sports people is that they tend to get published about, in almanacs and newspapers and the like. You can very easily find some high-quality factual information about their careers (as boring as the career itself may be). Assessing scientists as individual people is a lot harder; you can find lots of papers by scientists but will generally there will be less information about them.

I actually like all those - and do use wikipedia to find out info about such stuff.

But I also want the "old man murray" type of articles because in the future Google might not find anything:

That's why you get links to a few semi-reliable gaming sites that don't inhibit short-term memory. For example, gaming.wikia.com allows you to put in anything about games without too much worry about notability. Another site, bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net, allows you to be as detailed about Pokémon as you want.

In fact, "Wikipedia syndrome" is a bad thing. Some sites packed up thinking that they would be stored on Wikipedia, while Wikipedia was citing them as one of their critical resources. Once the site dropped, [citation needed].

a) The rest of the web often has a short memory

I wonder why... perhaps there's a metric ton of stuff being posted that floods whatever is being discussed, complete with a sub-par archive search. Not even a "random article" or "random date" to scour anything special in the archives.

Also: good lord, do we really need a Slashdot front page story every time Wikipedia does something suboptimal?

Also 2: When an article is up for deletion and someone posts a link on some forum to get a bunch of fanboys to come in and flood the deletion debate (or any other debate), that's Generally Considered Lame and not really effective at building consensus. Slashdot too.

do we really need a Slashdot front page story every time Wikipedia does something suboptimal?

Yes, without public pressure ego-tripping editors could do "suboptimal" AKA wrong things with impunity. Transparency is supposed to be Wikipedia's strength, and good decisions should have nothing to fear from public knowledge.

Generally Considered Lame and not really effective at building consensus

Which is a euphemism for "all the deletionists get butthurt when they can't hide from the public backlash".

I wish I could mod you up. They kept using the slang term "meatpuppets" which is apparently somebody who enters the discussion after being tipped off on it taking place. They might as well say outsider.

The definition is anyone who is recruited by a person party to a dispute for the sole or primary purpose of attracting support. This would include stirring the pot at slashdot or any other popular website with a provocative link.

Frowned upon because it turns a discussion into a dumb numbers game. It's basically the wikipedia version of a proxy fight.

The reference to puppet, as in sockpuppet, is because someone who is buzzed into a discussion is deemed to be acting on behalf of the person who summoned him.

It's a not-thinly-veiled out of hand dismissal of anybody's opinion who wasn't involved before being informed by somebody else. How is somebody's opinion invalidated by not living and breathing Wiki? Oh that's right, that's the only way anybody can become an editor anymore. So anybody who voices an opinion from the "outside" is written off because that would be too much of a "dumb numbers game" like democracy. Fuck all those "other" opinions, long live Wiki-elites! Oligarchy forever!

That the term exists is yet more proof that wikipedia is NOT open to all, that wikipedia admins have fostered an us versus them mentality, that wikipedians see wikipedia as a fortress of facts besieged by foreign devils, and that many if not most core wikipedia admins view wikipedia as their personal plaything. Wikipedia admins disgust me, they appear to be entirely composed of petty junior high school students who weren't smart enough to make the chess club or popular enough to get into the A/V club.

There are lots of people who auto revert every change they see, in order to get their own change count up.

I gave up on Wikipedia after a struggle to get an entry for a local hiking trail updated with correct information; the article cited a several year old blog post about parts being closed for construction.

Every time I updated the entry to indicate that the trail was open (as the construction had finished years ago), and changed the references to point to current news articles and recent blog postings, it

I don't know where they hell you've been, but butthurt has been in the active vocabulary in my place of residence (California) for well over a decade now. My 55 year old boss at an engineering firm uses the term regularly and he's a Fortran coder (punch cards before that). I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you are reaching for things to criticize.

[quote]I don't know where they hell you've been, but butthurt has been in the active vocabulary in my place of residence (California) for well over a decade now. My 55 year old boss at an engineering firm uses the term regularly and he's a Fortran coder (punch cards before that). I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you are reaching for things to criticize.[/quote]

- Penelope Pitstop [wikipedia.org], Muttley [wikipedia.org], and generally the whole cast of Wacky Races. Because, you know, it's not enough to know that there was a plot-less and story-less slapstick cartoon series that took the piss out of car racing, you need a whole page about each unidimensional character embodying a stereotype .

- Dino [wikipedia.org] from the Flintstones, along with every single other character, because the fucking dog of a cartoon show not centered around said dog is notable enough to have its own page on Wikipedia

- Bayonetta [wikipedia.org], the character of one action game, obviously deserving her own page separate from that of the game itself. And for that matter Tifa [wikipedia.org] from FF7, and Aeris [wikipedia.org] of "why the fuck can't I use a Phoenix Down NOW?" fame, i.e., a character which didn't even make it past the first CD in FF7, etc. And such fighting game characters as Sophitia [wikipedia.org] from Soul Calibur, or Kitana [wikipedia.org] and Mileena [wikipedia.org] from Mortal Kombat, who, you know, didn't actually have more of a role than generic combatant and drool fodder for geeks even in the movie. And generally every single female character that some editor whacked off to. Because, you know, a character that even the game makers couldn't be arsed to give more than the mandatory half-arsed description or a personality, is something that I need a whole page in an encyclopaedia for.

Etc. etc. etc.

I'm sorry, but if _those_ make the cut as notable enough to have their own page, then so does OMM. Note that I'm not even saying to delete those too. But the circle-jerk gang at Wiki needs to choose one or the other, really.

I've never heard of Old Man Murray but that doesn't mean it should be deleted. This all got argued about last time over obscure programming languages but, why are we deleting history? Are we running out of disk space? I think not.

Actually it's the opinion of the concensus of contributors who bother to contribute to deletion discussions. Which is just such a small group, in numbers and experience. The key to solving this is appreciating that Wikipedia is not a machine where you put in good information and get out the encyclopedia you want to see, it's about actually dealing with human beings on a large-scale collaborative project which has differences of opinion. Wikipedia needs more internal bickering, not snide remarks on the outsi

Wikipedia needs more internal bickering, not snide remarks on the outside.

It should be aware of and listen to the snide remarks and then go be introspective about it. The snide remarks are coming from people who don't have the time on their hands to deal with all the luggage that comes with being a even somewhat-involved editor.

Really Wikipedia needs to establish once and for all who its target audience it. The masses or the just the assholes who want to play admin and then proceed to listen to desires of its target audience.

Wikipedia needs more internal bickering, not snide remarks on the outside. You, you reading this, are the potential source of that bickering.

Okay, let's test this hypothesis.

Let's say I hear about Old Man Murray getting deleted from Wikipedia for not being notable. I feel incensed, because this is absolutely fucking retarded - that's like deleting the entry on the Encyclopedia Britannica, since nobody ever cites it as a source.

So I go, log in to my rarely-used Wiki account or just create a new one outright,

Great. So I say fuck you Wikipedia, and my chances of ever editing an article go down even further.

And wikipedia admins rejoice. They don't want any more opinions diluting their own. The more reasonable people they can chase away, the better, from their point of view. If wikipedia really were open to all, they would not be that important. They would not have as much control. No, wikipedia admins, for the most part, do not want to share their toy with you.

Whoever rated Sockatume's comment as "Insightful" has never attempted to contribute to WP. Those of us who have contributed and been slapped down know that Sockatume's comment is off base.

More correctly: an organization (even WP) is a reflection of its leadership. Given the dictatorial way that the small core group of wiki-deletionists take unilateral action despite facts to the contrary is probably a reflection of the WP executive team's behaviors.

The key to solving this is appreciating that Wikipedia is not a machine where you put in good information and get out the encyclopedia you want to see, it's about actually dealing with human beings on a large-scale collaborative project which has differences of opinion.

In fact, Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia at all. Wikipedia is in fact a game, specifically its an MMORPG--[NSFW] [encycloped...matica.com].

This isn't just the opinion of the internet diplomacy bridage of encyclopedia dramatica. It's also shared by the former editor of Encyclopedia Britannica [britannica.com]. He also gave this opinion more explicitly in a documentary about the influence of the web, which I can't find at the moment.

So Wikipedia is essentially a game. For the players, the stakes are not exactly high. Ultimately nobody cares how much "WP:EXP" they ammass, or how high they rise on the "WP:SCALE".

But for the rest of the world, the stakes are currently enormous. The reality is that Wikipedia is becoming the world's foremost gateway to knowladge. The end result of these players, their petty squabbles, cliques, and infighting, are the pages which the majority of the world is being directed to when it seeks information and learning. Needless to say, this is a disaster.

The dreadful fallout from so much politics and melodrama leaves pages that are essentially babbling and incoherant. I've ranted about this before [slashdot.org], so I'm not going to repeat myself here, except to say that in my opinion, the Wikipedia pages on mathematics are actively damaging the future of mathematics, probably turning many budding mathematicians off the subject before they discover anything about it. Wikipedia shows mathematics in its worst possible light, because no mathematician is allowed near those pages. As an expert, I know this is true of mathematics, but I suspect it's the same for many other subjects.

Our discussion here are of no avail. Ultimately the only solution to the Wikipedia Question will be to remove it from the control of Jimbo et al and place it in the hands of an international, cross institutional, academic body. People who could actually run a depository of knowladge, instead of playing games with it.

So you run out of 'good-faith contributors' well before you run out of asshats.

This is so true. It seems like every time there is a "Wiki screws the pooch" article there are a dozen comments containing stories of occasional contributors who after witnessing or being involved in some kind of editing drama that always end with "and that's why I stopped contributing to Wiki". It stands to reason that if this sort of antagonism is allowed to fester then the only people who will be left will be those content to engage in it.

Eric Wolpaw and Chet Faliszek have worked in the gaming industry, and the site itself is referenced in numerous interviews, articles, quotations, and even in games. All valid reasons for a Wikipedia entry, I'd think.

Eric Wolpaw and Chet Faliszek have worked in the gaming industry, and the site itself is referenced in numerous interviews, articles, quotations, and even in games. All valid reasons for a Wikipedia entry, I'd think.

For reference, they both work for Valve now, and worked on things like Half-Life 2, Portal 1/2, and Left 4 Dead 1/2.

I work in the industry. Nearly everyone I know who has been in this industry for 5 years or more are familiar with Old Man Murray. They remain legendary because of the Time-To-Crate metric is still at least thought of by everyone in the industry. But they're historically significant because of their unique style of vitriolic humor, which was widely read and widely followed at the time.

OMM was as significant in its day as Zero Punctuation is today. If Belinda Carlisle deserves a wikipedia entry for being

Articles that are not verified or not notable can go into a second tier where they have to be searched for by specifically requesting second tier access.

As it stands now, I've seen articles deleted because their sources have started falling off the net. This makes Wikipedia one of the absolute worst encyclopedias for anything outside of standard historic events.

A "shadow-wikipedia" isn't a good solution. It's about a notch below just putting up a specific wiki for the subject in question. Which solves the issue of having a project you want to work on, but it doesn't make Wikipedia any better. I think the answer is to have a better deletion appeals and article recovery system. Right now an article that's on the brink of falling into the deletion hole is a lot easier to fix than an article which has gone into the hole. It's like an event horizon. The way it should w

Wikipedia needs a better moderation system. Articles that are not verified or not notable can go into a second tier where they have to be searched for by specifically requesting second tier access.

Why is anything (any established article) being deleted from Wikipedia? Is the world suddenly running out of bits? Is Jimmy Wales really so hard up for storage that individual text pages will make a difference? It's not as if they have to print and bind books with it like a traditional encyclopaedia.

At the very least, it should be pretty simple to measure notability by access statistics. But that begs the question that if nobody is accessing it, it isn't even costing you in bandwidth to hang onto it, so you might as well not delete it even then.

Why is anything (any established article) being deleted from Wikipedia? Is the world suddenly running out of bits? Is Jimmy Wales really so hard up for storage that individual text pages will make a difference? It's not as if they have to print and bind books with it like a traditional encyclopaedia.

At the very least, it should be pretty simple to measure notability by access statistics. But that begs the question that if nobody is accessing it, it isn't even costing you in bandwidth to hang onto it, so you might as well not delete it even then.

100%. They could really make it into a feature. For example have a prominent widget at the top of the page that shows it's "Notability Rank" . Yes it would be gamed by spammers. Yes you would need an antispam system too that can handle DDOS style attacks that fake an increase in notability. However, while it may be a challenge, it is still a solvable solution.

Deleting stuff just doesn't make sense. Worse still, while there seems to be consensus across the net on this point, it's just flagrantly ignored, by

I've felt for a while this is how deletions should be handled. A stub that says that it was deleted, a link to the deletion discussion, a caution that its probably a bad article, a link to an archived version of the article and a link that brings the article back.

All the other articles have their histories available to non-admins, even historical versions of deleted articles should exist for the masses.

I've seen this happen first hand to useful and pertinent information on existing articles.

I authored a patch for a (notable?) SNES game a few years back called Seiken Densetsu 3 that allowed it to be played as 3 player. Many years before that a patch was created to play the game in english. The existing wikipedia article already had a story description as well as character descriptions and things of that nature, as well as information describing the english patch.

Shortly after I released my patch someone (not even me!) added information about it to the wikipedia article for the game, just a short sentence or two with citations linking a notable ROM hacking website with more information. A few weeks later the information was deleted for not being notable. Afterwards in google searches related to my patch I saw lots of forum posts with confused people trying to determine whether or not a patch existed, some saying the information was on Wikipedia, others saying they couldn't find it there.

In this instance, if the content was unverified / unsourced, then the individual who deleted the article should have "contributed" by providing sources (via wayback.org, if need be); but, the deletionists have no interest in contributing, and so they delete the content and then hide behind WP rules in defence of their laziness.

Indeed, this is the real problem: people who would rather delete things than fix them. What's worse are the bots which go around posting deletion notices based purely on whether the page has some tags missing, when the bot has absolutely no idea whether the page is actually within Wikipedia policies.

The fact that those non-fixers even have the *ability* to delete articles shows that the problem is deep-rooted and systemic. And you're right: having articles deleted for no good reason drove away this particular editor.

The deletion of OMM was instigated by Ben Schumin, a sad man who still holds a grudge against Erik Wolpaw, a writer at OMM, now working for Valve as a writer for games such as Portal. The fact that some sad sack like him can point at an article and say "this should be deleted" and the circle jerk of deletionist admins ignore the salient points made by users and experts of games journalism such as Kieron Gillen, delete the article and then pat themselves on the back for a job well done.

You know what should make your scratch your head? The problem you have just described at the same time happens to be the very essence and fundamental principle of Wikipedia. That anyone, including stupid morons, trolls with hidden agenda (competitors), and outright psychopaths can edit it any and every second, repeatedly and infinitely.

It follows that Wikipedia is, and has inherently been from the very beginning, a fundamentally flawed experiment. Thanks god Google is starting to realize this and is moving the Wikipedia result to SERPS position #5, while the first 4 links point to the authoritative or official site (if one exists).

It wasn't doomed from the beginning. It was doomed by it's cultural choices. Generally, there are more decent people in the world than douchebags. But the douchebags tend to be louder. Still, it takes a special set of circumstances to let the douchebags dominate. Usually this involves a critical mass of douchebags at high levels poisoning the culture of institution. The douchebags think everyone is out to get them, because everyone IS out to get them, because they are douchebags. And so the douchebags take great pains to alienate every non-douchebag they see, by engaging in petty slap fights, which douchebags enjoy but normal people despise. In the end, the institution in question devolves into a bunch of whiny self important douchebags running about screeching at each other and just pinching and slapping anyone they can get their doughy, clammy little hands on. These are people to whom a petty argument represents the most rewarding social interaction they are likely to have that day.

I used to contribute a fair amount to Wikipedia to get my brain going in the morning. I quit doing so a couple years ago, because the whole infighting and "notability" crap was ridiculous. Every single character from a book, movie, cartoon, video game, anime (pokemon, etc) gets a many-paged detailed entry while real people quickly get the brush because someone gets a thorn in their ass over something. And those "somethings" are hard to pin down. Some entries surprisingly don't exist, while others (someone with a podcast you've never heard of or who is supposedly some self-described social media expert, etc) gets an entry. That idiot from "Hot For Words" even has a wikipedia entry.

I won't be surprised if a lot of things get deleted in the next few years, because a bunch of people who are twelve years old today will, in the future, say "I've never heard of this Commodore thing, it must be totally made up. Or at least not notable enough, or I'd have heard of it! DELETED!"

Of course, I don't know how you'd solve the problem, either. It's not a solution to just say absolutely everything can be a wikipedia article. Every self-promoting jackhole is going to create their own entry, then and the quality of each article itself will drop. On the other hand, how much attention can really be given to the countless deletions that are proposed? Especially since, while some deletions occur with no discussion and immediately, others drag on indefinitely and are knock-down drag-out events. It's not a solution, but it certainly wouldn't hurt to raise the bar for deletions, at least. It should be a lot harder to delete something that isn't obvious spam or vandalism than it is to create it.

There's also DeletionPedia [dbatley.com], though I can't really tell what the current status of the site is.

I think you should go back through - they've become very good at culling crap about anime and the like as a secondarly consequence of the push for citations. (Primary sources are devalued. It's hard to have an article about a Pokemon where the only discussion of it is the game it appears in.) However "X is less notable than Y, and X is still there!" is not a persuasive argument for keeping Y or deleting X. The whole issue has to be addressed.

You're right. I quit bothering with Wikipedia, because it wasn't worth the hassle. Who wants to volunteer for an abusive relationship? Not me.

The last article I wrote was on the man who designed the Mars Lander airbag system. It was initially rejected because an editor said it was "original material" (I know the man and his family personally, and worked with him for five years or so) and had "insufficient references" (I only had a few links) and, bizarrely, because the gentleman in question was "insufficiently notable for Wikipedia".

So I rewrote the article with links to a couple dozen of the man's patents, cites from several books on aerospace history, a list of notable achievements he's had in the space biz, and links to his community activist and public service accomplishments. It was again deleted, on grounds that "it reads like hero worship". The funny part is, I don't even really like the guy! I just thought he ought to be in Wikipedia... but apparently not.

If Wikipedia was interested in fixing itself, they've had plenty of ideas and years to do it in. Your moderation idea is good. Another poster's 1-100 scoring idea is good. Adding a toggle to Wikipedia to let people browse "deleted" articles is good.

Wikipedia hasn't acted on any of these in the last 4 years. They do not care. The deletionists who are causing the problem are the ones in control of the site.

I wrote some time ago that Wikipedia should allow any content that could be interesting / informative to someone, after all she did not have the space limitation of a physical encyclopedia. I honestly can not understand why something has to be "remarkable" to be included in Wikipedia, especially when the criteria of "outstanding" is usualy being cited in news sites and the like that are not always have ethical criteria to decide what he saw or not "remarkable." or public interest.

Interesting/informative isn't the defining characteristic of an encyclopedia, though. I mean, my PhD thesis is interesting, but it's not going up there. Encyclopedias are about a different kind of content, specifically a review of a subject. They've at least reached a useful metric for suitability with the guideline that articles should have proper secondary sources. That, IMO, should be the sole criterion - "can you write a properly referenced review of this subject?".

I agree with you. And I would have absolutely no problem with the conclusions from your Ph.D thesis being placed in the relevant entry for the topic your thesis deals with. Then your thesis would be cited as a reference.

The problem is that the deletionists are trying to put limits on the subject matter. I don't give a shit whether the topic of your dissertation is in Quantum Theory or Buffy Studies [wikipedia.org], as long as it follows your criteria of "properly referenced review of the subject." They want to be able to say, "this topic isn't important enough to be part of the encyclopedia," and they have no reason for doing that. It's not like they have some sort of space limit. Subject importance is relative. If I'm searching for it, it's important to me.

Using yourself as an example, you may find irrelevant an "article about TheDarkMaster", but someone else might find relevant. And there we have the following problem: Why someone else can not have the "TheDarkMaster article" just because you think it's irrelevant?
There's a lot of articles on Wikipedia that I think is irrelevant, but I will not deleting them because of it. Why may be irrelevant to me, but it is important to another person.

Probably the best solution to this deletist/keepist nonsense is to rate articles according to their noteworthiness. This rating can either be derived according to how many other articles link in, or according to human judgement. Using this system, lower ranked articles will be naturally found far less, but at least they're there if you dig. It'd work like pagerank to a degree.

Keeping or deleting is otherwise a false dichotomy. There isn't a magical line that makes an article suddenly not important any more. There are however shades of grey.

One of the neat things about Wikipedia early on was that you could find entries on obscure people or places or things. That was one of the charming things about it. No matter how peripheral an item or event, there was someone, somewhere who could write an article about it.

This is why I quit writing for wikipedia. I would spend hours writing and posting reference links only to be told my references weren't good enough.

I've had "editors" tell me Foxnews was biased and not a good citation, and then two months later tell me CNN was biased and not a good citation. Wikipedia is the most unreliable source of information on the internet IMHO.

I've also had articles and updates deleted because the citation website had removed the content or completely shut down.

1) Delete any and all photos. Does it have a fair use rationale? Not good enough! Was the copyright owned by f-ing Nazi Germany, so presumably nobody is going to sue Wikipedia over it? (yes, I've seen this) Not good enough! But there are exceptions (see #5)2) Delete any article that doesn't interest them.3) Add non-sequitor references to a song written by their garage band that nobody's heard of to the end of articles under "In Other Media".4) Add the following categories to every article that is "notable" enough to survive:
- In Animé
- In Manga
- In Graphic Novels
- In Western Animation5) Note if said article could function as an excuse for posting cell phone pictures of their genitals. (ewww... just stop with this, please)6) Realize that if it comes down to choosing between a professionally-shot photo in the public domain and a cell phone picture of someone's shoulder taken with a Nokia cell phone from 2002 - they must go with the latter. Always. If someone else posts a higher-quality photo they must sit at their computer and revert the edit incessantly until the person posting the better photo gives up.

Firstly, I won't be donating to Wikipedia again. This is not because I'm an OMM fanboy taking my bat home in a huff, although I am also that. But actually, it's because this story has made me look into Wikipedia more, and apparently this shit is rife. I guess I should have known that, but I'd always been scared to check because I still had some faith in one human endeavour and was happy to let things stay that way, until I felt some pressing need to know otherwise. Well, game over on that front. Back to total misanthropy for me.

Secondly, it's actually quite an interesting read because the Schumin guy who nominated for deletion, is evidently really, really, pathetic. And not in a kind of sad and disappointing, move along cowboy way, but actually to a degree that's almost gripping. This article highlights an almost iconic exemplar of the form of pathetic, to the degree that it's actually compelling.

To whit, and as best as I can tell from summaries, a man who is mocked - for being pathetic no less - by a popular gaming culture website waits a DECADE for revenge, whilst the world moves on around him, and the revengee behind the site goes on to pen dialogue for a video game that many people rightly consider one of the genuinely enduring classics of the new age.

This 'revenge', and I use the term loosely, is a heartfelt, but misguided attempt to remove all evidence of revengee's classic projects from Wikipedia, which is petty to an alarming degree, but also absorbingly impotent. Seriously, I would be amazed if anyone involved in the original site gave one flying fuck, because they're probably too busy banging hookers on their jetskies right now. On a lake of money.

And after literally waiting until he thought this site had decayed into irrelevancy and finallly making his move, he discovers that half the internet still cares, the whole thing goes Barbara Streisand, and we just get to see what a massive, unerring loser at the peak of his skills really looks like.

And, damn, I've enjoyed the ride... but that's sadly all it is. Because tomorrow, said loser will have lost his momentary connection to relevancy. And OMM will still have rocked my world.

Overturn. No relisting.. While AfD gives administrators a wide degree of latitude on interpreting the discussions - and I should know, having closed some corkers in my time - we should remain mindful that "interpreting the discussion" exists alongside the far older rough check guideline on deletion that it should only occur if 2/3 of the commenters or more are in favor of deletion. Interpreting a discussion in which an overwhelming majority of commenters are in favor of keeping the article as concluding in a consensus to debate is possible. But it requires extraordinary evidence that those arguing to keep are out of line with WIkipedia policy. The explanation presented by Lifebaka falls miles short of this bar. The article clearly does not prima faciae fail notability - it has numerous citations to reliable and independent sources. There is no evidence that the commenters on the original AfD were unaware of notability policy or of the content of the article, or that they were primarily blind meatpuppets gaming the system. Yes, the discussion attracted a lot of comments. That should probably tell us something, and that something should not be "Blimey, our readers really use articles like this, we'd better delete them." The contributors on the original AfD appear to have looked at both the policy and the article, and decided that the minimum bar for inclusion was cleared. End of discussion. There is just no way to reasonably argue that a consensus to delete was reached. I thus view Lifebaka's deletion as an abuse of his admin powers - interpreting a discussion in which an overwhelming majority of participants acknowledge your viewpoint and still disagree with you as supporting your viewpoint strains good faith to its breaking point. I further see no value in relisting - the discussion as it took place is a conclusive endorsement of the view that the article clears the minimum standards for inclusion. Barring a compelling new point about the article, any relisting would be a textbook example of the tendency to get articles deleted not out of actual policy grounds but just by asking enough other parents that eventually you get one to side with you. In other words, it's a shameless violation of WP:ADMINSHOP [wikimedia.org]. Barring an actual new argument, attempts to relitigate the already settled discussion are disruptive. Phil Sandifer [wikimedia.org] (talk [wikimedia.org]) 17:54, 3 March 2011 (UTC)